Sunday, August 24, 2003

On NPR this morning, respectable historian Walter Russell Mead,
pressed into service as a public affairs commentator, complained that
some security council members -- the French came particularly to mind
-- might try to frustrate US attempts to arrange a UN bailout of the Iraq
occupation by trying to put "poison pills" in an enabling resolution.

He didn't say explicitly what those "poison pills" would be, so
listeners were left to guess. An independant chain of command for UN
forces? An open bidding process on contracts, with no favoritism for
politically connected American companies? Colin Powell has made it
clear over the past couple of days that neither
would be acceptable to Dubya's crew, at least at the present time.

Now, some might consider demands like that to be at least arguably
reasonable. That there are in fact grounds to question the basic
competence of a command authority which luxuriates
in Saddam's old palaces -- the hated symbols of the Baathist
regime -- while leaving its own troops in the field far too long,
performing duties for which they are completely untrained, short of
everything from spare
parts to food
and water.

But perhaps that's not all. The French might have floated
some genuinely unreasonable proposal. Something much more
outrageous than some sort of joint command structure which they, along with the
Russians, Indians and others are demanding in public,
even if Mead couldn't be bothered to say what it was.

Because otherwise, even a respectable historian on "liberal" NPR
would be spouting government propaganda which is totally divorced from
reality. And that sort of thing just doesn't happen in America.

Late details: The Mead interview is here; his remarks on the UN start
about two minutes in. For even more newspeaky doubleplusgoodness, check out this interview with scholar, and former CIA analyst Graham Fuller, in which he actually asks "How long can the Shiites sit around and not be part of the national
struggle to free themselves from the liberation?"